1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a partition member of a cooking chamber and an electric oven having the same and, more particularly, to a partition member included in an electric oven to partition a cooking chamber of the oven into upper and lower cooking regions, thereby enabling independent use of respective partitioned cooking regions.
2. Description of the Related Art
An electric oven is an appliance used for baking or roasting food by circulating air around heaters into a cooking chamber. The electric oven comprises a cooking chamber to accommodate food to be cooked, a heater to generate heat, and a fan to circulate air around the heater into the cooking chamber. If necessary, upper and lower grill heaters may be selectively arranged at upper and lower portions of the cooking chamber to apply radiant heat to the food placed in the cooking chamber.
Generally, the conventional electric oven cannot simultaneously cook two or more different kinds of food because it is equipped with one cooking chamber, one heater and one fan. Such conventional electric oven is inefficient because the electric oven must be operated with the entire capacity thereof even when a small amount of food is cooked.
In order to eliminate the above drawback, an electric oven for cooking two kinds of food at different temperatures, respectively, has been proposed, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. Heisei 09-303791. This electric oven includes two fans vertically arranged in rear of the cooking chamber, in order to implement a cooking system in which the amounts of hot air respectively applied to different kinds of food located in upper and lower cooking regions are different.
However, using the disclosed electric oven, a rack to divide the cooking chamber into the upper and lower cooking regions has no function to intercept heat transfer between the divided cooking regions, inevitably causing the transfer of heat generated in one of the cooking regions to the other cooking region. This makes it difficult to cook different food items placed in the respective cooking regions at appropriately determined different temperatures, and results in heat loss between the cooking regions when only one of the cooking regions is used to cook food.